


i'm rested & i'm ready (to begin)

by mymostimaginaryfriend



Series: cartel carols [4]
Category: Queen of the South (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Caretaking, F/M, New Year's Eve, Season 2 AU, Trust Issues, sex is great and all but have you tried naps, tipsy caretaking, what's a girl to do when that guy who she most definitely does not trust saves her life...AGAIN
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22017199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mymostimaginaryfriend/pseuds/mymostimaginaryfriend
Summary: It might take every ounce of will and more than a little divine intervention, but Teresa Mendoza is going to make it through this year even if it kills her.Luckily, she has some help.
Relationships: Teresa Mendoza/James Valdez
Series: cartel carols [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1217811
Comments: 16
Kudos: 71





	i'm rested & i'm ready (to begin)

**Author's Note:**

> Set in early s2 pre-Guero reunion.
> 
> Title from 'February Seven' by The Avett Brothers and just a big general toast to The Mountain Goats 'This Year' as well.

“How’s the arm?” James demanded, the whites of his eyes flashing in stark relief against the rivulets of red dripping down his forehead. She could tell by his tone it wasn’t the first time he’d asked. He looked like hell. She knew the feeling. “ _Teresa_ —”

“Still bleeding,” she ground out, hissing in pain when the truck jumped a curb, jangling all of the bruised bones in her body like pennies in a jar. Her shredded left shirt sleeve was soaked in blood, red seeping through the fingers she clamped futilely around her forearm.

To think, just this morning she’d been marveling at the fact that against all odds, she had made it through another year. And not just any year but _this_ year—a year that salted the earth of her existence. A year she’d burn to the ground if she could.

The very worst year of her life.

James cursed under his breath, the truck swerving a bit as he attempted to shrug off his overshirt. She reached for the cuff of his sleeve, yanking it free of his arm before wrapping the fabric tightly around her wound.

“Keep pressure on it.”

Maybe she should have held off celebrating her survival until closer to midnight. Given the universe more of a challenge. Or maybe her clock had been counting down to a different zero all along.

“Hold on,” James muttered, taking a hard left down an alley, talking as much to himself as to her. “We’re almost there.”

She clenched her jaw to block out the pain, blowing a breath of frustration through her teeth. It might take every ounce of will and more than a little divine intervention, but she was going to make it through this year if it fucking killed her.

♛♛♛

Six months ago, if someone had asked Teresa if she trusted James, she wouldn’t have needed to even think before responding. The words would have sprung from her consciousness straight to her lips without so much as a microsecond of doubt in between:

_Absolutely not._

Back then, she wouldn’t even have noticed the mental asterisk attached until hours later when she was back safe and sound at the warehouse—often, in no small part, thanks to him. Only then, in the few seconds between despair and sleep, while she quickly tabulated the balance sheet of her day, would she notice the discrepancy.

Something about James just didn’t add up.

He’d saved her life—more than once. That fact was burned into her brain in black and white. But then there were the grey areas, settling like a thick mist over the easy answers, obscuring his true self from view. Yes, he’d helped her when he could, but he had also informed on her to Camila, invaded her privacy, and made her an accessory to countless crimes. What kind of man accepted this life? Chose to surround himself with such cruelty? Willingly participated in the pain and subjugation of others?

Could any act of kindness ever truly balance the scales of such violence?

She’d always been good with numbers but she wasn’t adept at this kind of math. It was impossible to quantify intent, to calculate certainty. It felt useless tallying the virtues against the sins when she was unsure how much value to give the remainder.

It seemed like the sort of judgement best reserved for a higher power—one far, far away from where she resided now on the opposite end of the cosmic scale. Down here in the dirt, with blood permanently under her fingernails and the sour taste of adrenaline scoring her tongue, trusting anyone seemed a losing game. Like searching for faith on a scratch-off ticket.

Sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d win enough to buy another chance. Odds were, you’d just lose.

Guero and Brenda’s deaths only underscored the lesson she’d been learning her entire life: she only had herself.

Her plan was to run. Trusting James hadn’t even occurred to her as a possibility.

But plans changed. 

♛♛♛

“Starting your New Year’s resolution early, Pote?” Charger laughed, making an enthusiastic point of enjoying his bacon while Pote pushed a spinach and eggwhite omelette around on his plate.

“This physique doesn’t maintain itself, cabrón. If you want to live to see the New Year, you better wipe that smirk off your face.”

Charger grinned and Teresa hid her own smile by taking a bite of toast. She was still getting used to having Pote around but had to admit she enjoyed the extra buffer he provided in Camila’s house. It was nice to know where she stood with _someone_ here. With Camila the ground was always shifting beneath her feet and with James...She watched through the glass doors as he flicked away a cigarette and walked inside carrying a folder.

James was a whole other cause of instability.

“How about you?” Charger greeted him. “Picked out a resolution yet?”

James made a face like the very thought was beneath him. “New Year's resolutions are bullshit,” he sniffed. “I don’t make a habit of lying to myself.”

Charger exchanged a look with Pote. “So quitting smoking for a week like usual then?”

“Fuck off,” James grumbled but his eyes briefly lit with humor as he set the folder down on the breakfast table. He pulled out a copy of one of the pages from Guero’s journal and tipped his chin at Pote. “What do you know about this guy?”

Pote read the name and looked up with wide eyes. “Hector? The money launderer? He’s not much better than El Limpiador.” He cut a glance at Teresa and her breakfast turned to ash in her mouth. “He and Epifanio used to be really tight before he moved to the States. Still could be.”

“He’s our next priority.”

Pote frowned. “We don’t even have money to clean yet.”

“Camila says it’s worth the risk.”

“ _She’s_ not the one risking her skin meeting this guy.”

James looked steadily at Pote, his gaze both an answer and a warning. Pote pushed his plate away with a huff but kept the rest of his thoughts to himself. 

“This intel has been good so far. It got us King George,” James continued, before a glance at Teresa seemingly decided the matter. “Get your stuff; it’s a bit of a drive.”

She sat up straight. “Me?”

James pressed his lips together and looked away, shoving the paper back into the folder. She didn’t even try to interpret his displeasure; whether his frown was over her questioning him or her involvement in general, it didn’t matter. This had Camila written all over it. 

Teresa had known to expect an adjustment period after their tenuous new partnership took root in that grassy field, but thus far it had only been Teresa shooting out the windows at federales or risking her neck on dangerous runs. The hurdles kept coming, higher and higher, making her wonder if any act of loyalty would be enough to pass Camila’s test.

James paused behind her chair on the way out. “You wanted to be indispensable,” he murmured, like a wind from the past blowing leaves over her grave. 

The words, first spoken so long ago, were still true. She wanted to be indispensable. But more than anything she wanted to be indispensable _enough_ —powerful _enough_ to be protected from unnecessary risks and missions like these. Protected at all, really.

“Meet you out front in twenty.”

She only needed ten.

♛♛♛

No matter their individual features, certain kinds of men all looked the same. Something about the way they looked at a person, a detached appraisal of worth that had nothing to do with their immortal soul and everything to do with the bottom line. If you knew what to look for, there was always evidence of the rot. A combination of tells genetically designed to activate the carefully cultivated survival instinct passed down from generation to generation amongst their prey.

Teresa had felt it the moment they stepped into Hector’s office and judging from the way James kept stepping between them into Hector’s eyeline, he felt something was off too.

Turned out Hector was still close to Epifanio. Real close.

When two more men entered the room and Hector excused himself to “make a call”, James shot her a look she could read clear as day. 

“You trust me?” he breathed, trigger finger already twitching as his eyes ticked off all of the exits, settling on the floor-to-ceiling window behind Hector’s desk. He didn’t wait for a reply. He didn’t need one. Some primal part of them already knew the answer.

When she had time to debate it, there was no debate at all. But when her life was on the line—when she was mere minutes from overdose in an airport storage closet, when gunshots shattered the windshield, when he yelled “run” or “get down”—her instincts never hesitated. A drowning woman didn’t care who threw the lifeline, she told herself. She just held on as tight as she could. 

And yet every time she had been forced to place her life in his hands, he had delivered it back safely to her by the end of the day.

Maybe that’s why all these months later, when he had turned to her and said, “we’re in this together” she hadn’t laughed in his face.

Maybe that’s why when things went south with Hector, she didn’t hesitate to follow his lead, even if that meant running after him through a plate glass window.

And maybe that’s why, only the sound of his voice, assuring—demanding—that she’d make it, kept the seductive shadows of unconsciousness at bay.

“I’ve got you,” he said, pulling her out of the truck. 

Maybe a part of her was starting to believe him.

♛♛♛

Whether from adrenaline or blood loss, time wasn’t passing quite as it should. The macro and the micro melted together, broader strokes giving way to exquisite detail with nothing to bridge the in-between. One moment she sat transfixed by the motes of dust drifting above the dashboard in the late afternoon sun. The next they were bursting into a dark room.

James’ safe house wasn’t even a house but a small, windowless office in a mostly vacant industrial park. It wasn’t much bigger than a storage unit and that’s how it seemed he’d been using the space. There were a couple of trunks against the far wall, an army surplus cot, a metal locker and a safe. He pointed her toward the closet-sized bathroom and rushed over to one of the trunks, flipping the lid open and rummaging inside. He was moving a lot faster than she was. Moving a lot faster than she _could_.

She limped to the bathroom, almost relieved there wasn't a mirror when she finally flipped on the light switch. The way James had kept demanding updates, his eyes keeping a constant running tally of her person, told her all she needed to know. She closed the toilet lid and sat down, the cut on her knee protesting against the rub of the denim. She’d just rest her eyes for a moment, she decided. Just for a minute or two. 

“Hey, hey, hey, no. Come on, Teresa. Stay awake.”

Her head dipped sharply and her eyes jerked open. The sink was running and James was crouched before her. “Come on, you’re okay. You’re fine,” he told her, his voice laced through with the sort of implacable authority of someone who was used to giving orders with no question of them being followed; stating opinions like facts as if Death itself might listen to him before it knew the difference.

“Let me see,” he said, unwrapping his shirt from around her arm, cradling her forearm in his hands as he carefully peeled back her flannel. She was getting way too used to the sight of blood on plaid.

“Shit. Yeah that’s gonna need stitches.”

In one blink he was back up by the sink, wetting a washcloth. In the next, he was kneeling between her knees. 

She found herself oddly transfixed by the crown of his head. James wasn’t an overly tall man, but he was taller than her and something about him had always _felt_ tall. Maybe because he always seemed so in control, so in command. There was something unsettling about seeing him from this angle, head bowed as though in supplication. Or worship.

“This is going to hurt,” he warned.

She cleared her throat. “It always does.”

His eyes jerked up to hers, the blood on his face having grown tacky on his skin as it dried. She followed the trail down from the cut at his hairline, past the detour of his eyebrows, tracing over the sharp planes of his face to the hollow underneath his cheekbone, where one last drop crawled to a halt near his parted lips. He was shaken, she realized. Shaking.

He swallowed and looked away, hand heavy on her thigh as he reached behind him for a bottle of dark liquor. 

“You’ve survived worse.”

She licked her dry lips and obediently took a gulp. “How do you know?”

He just looked up at her for a moment, holding the wash cloth tightly over her wound. His hands were steady now, face focused, eyes dark and deep as a freshly dug grave. He raised his chin slightly and they caught the light, her own reflection staring back at her through him like a benediction.

He knew.

He bent his head back over her arm, lifting the washcloth to check underneath. “No resolution for you?” he asked, voice deliberately casual as though he were walking a careful line down the edge of a cliff.

Teresa let out a humorless laugh. She’d only ever had one resolution, really. It was the same one every year—

“Don’t die.”

James tipped his head in acknowledgement, his lips twisting into the ghost of a smile.

“Happy fucking New Year.”

  
  


♛♛♛

“What if there hadn’t been a window?” Teresa asked over her shoulder. “Or if it had been bullet-proof glass?”

The bandage was tight around her forearm but the liquor burned a pleasant path down her throat, diluting the pain into a manageable ache. She was full, thanks to a gourmet feast of shitty protein bars, Gatorade and Aleve; patched up—six stitches in her arm and a judicious use of steri-strips on her knee—and clean, or as clean as she would get without a shower. There hadn’t been much extra clothing to choose from but James had lent her a pair of boxers to replace her bloodied jeans. Despite the stuffiness of the air, the linoleum felt deliciously cool beneath her legs. 

“You really wanna go down that road?” James answered wryly from where he sat, perched on the edge of a trunk behind her. He rested the bottle against her collar bone, passing it back to her.

She shrugged and tipped the bottle up. With every swallow of rye she was closer to forgetting. Forgetting she almost died today. Forgetting that James and her didn’t do this sort of thing. 

Talk like this. _Touch_ like this. 

Her shoulder blades bumped gently into his knees, her torso swaying as he ran his hands through her hair, searching for the last remnants of glass.

“Would have had to shoot our way out. Not the best odds but not the worst.”

She wondered idly if he was counting her as an asset or a handicap in his analysis. 

“What’s your closest call?” she asked instead, lulled for the moment into indulging her curiosity. It was easier to ask like this, when they weren’t face to face. Talking about their pasts was tricky enough—like navigating a minefield. Or defusing a bomb. Sometimes the best approach was an unexpected angle and an easy escape route. 

He thought it over, fingers working diligently in the silence. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the ebb and flow, wondering if he found the repetitive motion as soothing as she did. There couldn’t be much, if any, glass left by now.

“My helmet got hit in Afghanistan,” he finally replied, voice distant but steady. “Left me flat on my ass, staring at the sky. Couldn’t hear shit and was blinded by the sun. Thought I was dead.”

“When did you realize you weren’t?”

“When I got shot in the leg.”

“Oh my god,” she let out a giggle before she could help herself, bubbles rushing incandescently to the surface. James’ hands stilled in her hair and she hiccuped, chastened, but he only let out a breath of laughter and tugged on a curl in soft rebuke.

“First time I got shot,” he commented blithely, like he was talking about trying a hobby not a traumatic bodily injury. He squeezed her shoulder once and she leaned forward so he could stand. 

“How many times _have_ you been shot?” she wondered, frowning in disbelief when he had to think for longer than a few seconds. “That many?”

He shrugged and walked over to the locker, looking up at the ceiling. “Four times? I think. Five? Does buckshot count?”

She pulled herself onto the cot, suddenly sober. Shot all those times and for what? Country? Capitalism? _Camila_? She swallowed down the sudden taste of bitterness with another sip of Jim Beam and watched as he pulled his bloodstained shirt over his head. She wondered how many scars were hidden amongst the tattoos on the planes of his torso. Wondered how long it would take to lose count. 

It was easy to forget. Just because James had more power than she did, didn’t mean he didn’t know what it was like to be expendable in the eyes of the people who had even more. Between the army and Camila, his entire adult life had been spent as cannon fodder.

“Weren’t you tired of it?” she asked and he shot her a questioning glance. “War?” 

Something unreadable flashed across his face, quick as lightning, illuminating the black of his eyes with something open, irritated and raw. He turned his head and scrubbed a hand over his face, the line of his shoulders as loud as a slammed emergency exit door.

“I’ve never been shot,” she offered him the same courtesy, hugging her knees to her chest. It seemed like a dangerous sort of thing to say out loud. Like an issued invitation with an unanswered RSVP. He paused for a moment, then pulled on a clean shirt. There was a strange intimacy to witnessing his routine: him emptying his pockets, taking off his watch, checking the magazine of his gun.

She thumbed the cord of an old scar that ran over the back of her hand. “Stabbed, but not shot.”

James sent a quick, searching glance over his shoulder, his eyes sweeping over her like he could see the source of all her past pain. See it and mend it like he had tonight.

He rubbed the back of his neck and met her eyes. “Some things,” he said, face softer now, almost apologetic. “Once you pick them up...are hard to put back down.” 

There was an earnestness in his expression, a yearning, that didn’t disappear as quickly as it should.

She held out the bottle.

“James?” she asked, as the cot dipped a bit dangerously beside her. The air felt deliciously thick around her skin, comfortingly heavy against her eyelids. The abyss was still there, it never left. But instead of needing to kick as hard as she could to escape it’s gaping maw, it was as though she was drifting in the sun over deep dark water.

“Yeah?”

“Can you swim?”

♛♛♛

She awoke with a start, eyelids stuck together and the dull echo of pain twinging at her temples, a muted preview of the hangover sure to come. An awareness slowly filtered through the fog of sleep, nerve endings awakening, synapses stuttering to life. Signals sent out, receptors reporting back. 

Her entire body felt bruised, her stitches ached and her shoulder joint protested loudly from its position wedged beneath her. Yet irrationally, she still felt that same feeling from when she was drifting off: the comfort of gravity, the lull of the deep. The sense of support from some powerful force of nature. She lay, half sprawled, half held over an extremely warm, extremely solid pillow, her arms and legs woven under, over and in between—

_James._

Somehow, by some feat of drunken mechanics, they had managed to both fit somewhat comfortably on the cot, with only the knot of their limbs to keep them from tumbling off either edge.

She waited for the adrenaline to kick in, the inevitable fight or flight response to their closeness, of waking up in unfamiliar arms. But for once her body had a better memory than her fear. It remembered the times he had touched her without hurting her, recalled the way his hands had held her when she was in pain.

It had never felt like this before though. Touch with the time to feel it. No pain or injury monopolizing her senses, no danger to distract.

It felt nice...the pressure of another body against hers. Unexpectedly pleasant. She knew most men would wince at those descriptors— _nice, pleasant_ —but most men wouldn’t know how near non-existent nice was in her life. How few and far between the pleasures.

James did.

He’d saved her life again.

And just like every time she allowed herself to think that thought, another followed it, frantic and scared: _it didn’t matter._

She couldn’t let it.

Past wasn’t prologue when it came to survival. Each morning the clock started anew. Life was an endless tyrannical loop of fear, adrenaline and exhaustion. Her vigilance was a yoke across her shoulders and a drain upon her soul. The burden was so heavy that she’d barely noticed at first. When James had started lifting some of the weight.

But here, with sleep-heavy limbs tangled together, sinking in the warm viscous twilight between cold reality and blissful unawareness, she didn’t feel like she was drowning in the dark. She felt almost safe. Buoyed against the endless black.

Fingers twitched against her spine, ghosting over the skin at the hemline of her top and amazingly she felt a pendulum of attraction swoop haltingly across her belly, its rusty gears squeaking from disuse. She didn’t let herself think, allowing herself the freedom for once to just react, leaning into his touch, chasing a firmer grip. Her instinctive motion tipped the edge of their precarious balance and with a disconcerting dip of vertigo, she gasped and jerked, reflexively grabbing at the fabric of his shirt to keep herself from falling to the floor.

For a reckless moment, she willed him awake, her heart pounding high and fast in her chest at the possibility. The thought of his warm hand dragging slowly up, up, up her leg, firmly grasping her hip, rolling her beneath him. She let herself imagine the weight of him, settling into the cradle of her thighs. What he’d feel like. How he’d sound. What he'd look like staring down at her.

More often than not she found herself bristling underneath his scrutiny but now she couldn’t help but think of the pleasure promised by such undivided attention. The aching thrill of having that kind of focus concentrated solely on her.

She smoothed a hand up his chest to his shoulder and gripped the muscle there. James made a soft noise in the back of his throat, his hand flexing on her thigh. She felt a stab of want so sharp and sweet that she had to blink back a hot rush of tears.

This wasn’t a good idea. There were factors outside of their control, factors why this could never happen. But she hadn’t realized she wasn’t too broken to feel this; that she wasn’t too broken to _float_.

“Y’okay?” James mumbled thickly, pressing a firm hand to the small of her back, pulling her more securely onto the cot and into him. She allowed herself to be molded to his side, hitching her leg higher across his thighs, pressing her nose under his jaw.

“I’m okay,” she whispered, lips brushing the tender skin of his neck, gratified by the small hitch in his breath as she spoke, even more so when he sighed deeply beneath her.

The clock would reset again, counting down to a whole new set of zeroes. But the black no longer seemed a yawning void waiting to swallow her whole. Instead it felt like the dark, hushed precipice of the dawn of something new.

The future wasn’t just something to survive _until_. The future was a possibility spread out before her.

She smiled, whispering the words into his skin. 

“Happy New Year.”

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> Wishing you all a Happy New Year! Here's to Jeresa's triumphant return in 2020. May this season treat us well. <3


End file.
